Marcy Verduin didn’t begin her career as a physician, or even a medical student. First, she was a high school science teacher and cheerleading coach. That foundation took her on a winding path that led her to become an internationally recognized professor of psychiatry and the UCF College of Medicine’s associate dean of students.
In her final year of college, Verduin was planning to be a chemist. But after working countless hours in labs, she realized she wanted to work with people as a physician. By the time she realized what she wanted to do, the deadline for medical school applications had passed. Looking to fill the next year before she could apply, she began her career as a teacher.
“I knew I wanted to go to medical school, but I also really enjoyed being a teacher’s assistant and a peer tutor in college, so I looked for teaching jobs to fill my year” she says. “When I applied to be a teacher, they asked, ‘How soon can you start?’ and I said, ‘As soon as you need me.’ They walked me into the classroom to start teaching that same day.”
As a teacher, Verduin saw the way students’ home lives and other life challenges affected them behaviorally and academically. One day, during one of Verduin’s most challenging classes, she asked each student to write her a note about themselves.
“As I read these notes, I learned so much about these kids, things like, ‘My dad’s in jail,’ or ‘My mom has HIV’ and they were so calm after they wrote it because they were able to share the things on their mind,” she says. “At the time, I had no idea that I was going to become a psychiatrist, but when I look back at my life, the pieces were there.”
When a year had passed, she applied and was accepted to medical school at the University of Florida, planning to eventually work in private practice. During that training, she saw a close family member die from alcoholism and another attempt suicide. Those experiences caused her initially to rule out psychiatry as a specialty.
“Because of these things I had lived and witnessed, I thought I would never practice psychiatry because it was too close to home,” she says.
But during her mandatory third-year psychiatry rotation in med school, she found that she loved coming home and reading about her patients and couldn’t wait to come back to see how they had done in the hospital overnight.
“That rotation is when it clicked to me that that was what I wanted to do.”
Verduin joined the UCF College of Medicine as an associate professor of psychiatry in 2007, before the new school welcomed its first class in 2009. She was named associate dean for students in 2010. She says the biggest lesson she has learned along her career journey is embracing what she called “intentional serendipity.”
“I didn’t set out to be an associate dean for students, in fact, I didn’t think I would do a lot of the things I did, but when the opportunity came up, I thought, ‘I think I would love that,’” she says. “There’s this role of serendipity in your path, and when you see it happening, you should embrace it.”
